Milestone: 19,000 MailChimp API Users

A couple years ago we had to decide between hiring a sales guy, or investing in MailChimp’s API by hiring a programmer. At the time, it was a really tough decision for us to make.

But I’ll let you in on my little management secret for making big decisions like this…

I pretty much make all my important "businessy decisions" by stock-image searching. It’s the modern day magic 8-ball. Sure, you could scour Harvard Business Review for case studies. But pictures are worth a thousand words. And quicker to read.

MailChimp now has more than 19,000 API users.

That’s more users than any one sales guy could ever get for us (unless he was really, really fast with the cold calls and powerpoint presentations). In fact, when I started this blog post, my title was "18,000 API users." Over the last few days while writing this post, we surpassed 19,000 users (yeah it took me more than one day to write this masterpiece. So what?).

In the past, we didn’t have anyone actually dedicated to the API. It was just an afterthought. After our programmers were finished coding some new feature, they’d think, "Hey, we better go back and code this into the API." But let’s be honest: who likes to do their work twice? Especially when you have new features to work on for the next point release? So the API work got done, but it took too much time. Investing in a full-time API team was a big step for us, but totally worth it.

RTFM

In the beginning, our API documentation pretty much sucked. I know this because people constantly sent API questions to our customer service team, and so we constantly tinkered with how to design our API home page to look so unbelievably complicated, that only the most advanced programmers would actually click the link to dig deeper.

But once we got a full-time person in place, the documentation got better. It took time to write it all up, because we were busy coding new features into the API (and fixing problems from the previous versions). But over time, we pretty much filled in all the cracks.

Our documentation is so thorough (check it out at mailchimp.com/api/rtfm), that most integrations happen w/out us knowing anything about them (which has its pros and cons, but that’s a topic for another blog post).

Open and Free

Some companies require you to register, or even pay a fee before you can access their API. MailChimp’s API is open and free, which encourages other developers to link their apps to ours. Combine that with great documentation, and users will surprise the hell out of you. New integrations pop up that you’ve never heard of.

One of the first, "wow, someone integrated w/out even talking to us!" integrations was with Batchbook CRM. They’ve got a great app, by the way. I’ve never found a CRM that I could actually stick to, but theirs is different. Anyway, the folks from Batchbook went on and founded the Small Business Web, which is a whole network of web apps who interlink w/each other via our open APIs. If you run a web app, and you have an API, you definitely need to join the Small Business Web. Hurry.

"Our philosophy was always to create a product that was fairly simple to get going and didn’t require a tremendous amount of technical support. We built our business around a very scalable product, which allowed us to do things like target hosting companies and get massive numbers of users with one deal, rather than focusing on one very complex deal."

Well, having a robust, well-documented API lets you do just that, except you don’t even need a sales guy like Brett to do the deal.

And I know I was just joking around earlier about our programmer having a better sense of humor, but it’s true. When our API guy (his name is Jesse, btw) joined, we asked him to contribute something to MailChimp Labs. His contribution? The MailChimp LOLcode Interpreter.

I wasn’t aware of the Small Business Web until one of my users posted a topic about it in my UserVoice forums; once I read about the concept and saw the list of companies that were members, I put this on my “must do” list.

While I’ve integrated with a couple of apps behind the scenes for my own purposes (MailChimp is one of them!), I haven’t yet invested on my API — but I will very soon. I love the strategy; it sure beats the pants off the “sales guy” strategy :)

(BTW, you’ve got a great way of making businessy type decisions. I’m totally going to steal that.)

This is great and just the reinforcement we need at Fanminder to help make APIs an even more prominent part of our strategy. We use MailChimp and worship your UI and functionality (though please make it easier to batch delete names!) so your word carries much credibility with us.